GOALS
Part-4
How to Get Everything You Want –
Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible
By Brian Tracy
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
_________________________________________________
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Chapter-7
Analyze Your Beliefs
Chapter-8
Start At The Beginning
Chapter-9
Measure Your Progress
Conclusion: Take Action Today
DEDICATION
To Rick Metcalf, a good friend, a great American, an extraordinary entrepreneur,
one of the best salesmen who ever lived, and an inspiration to everyone who knew him.
I only wish you could be here to read this book. You left us all too soon.
PREFACE
This book is for ambitious people who want to get ahead faster. If this is the way you think and feel, you are the person for whom this book is written. The ideas contained in the pages ahead will save you years of hard work in achieving the goals that are most important to you.
I have spoken more than 2000 times before audiences of as many as 23,000 people, in 24 countries. My seminars and talks have varied in length from five minutes to five days. In every case, I have focused on sharing the best ideas I could find on the particular subject with that audience at that moment. After countless talks on various themes, if I was only given five minutes to speak to you, and I could only convey one thought that would help you to be more successful, I would tell you to “write down your goals, make plans to achieve them, and work on your plans every single day.”
This advice, if you followed it, would be of more help to you than anything else you could ever learn. Many university graduates have told me that this simple concept has been more valuable to them than four years of study. This idea has changed my life, and the lives of millions of other people. It will change yours as well.
The Turning Point
A group of successful men got together in Chicago some time ago, talking about the experiences of their lives. All of them were millionaires and multi-millionaires. Like most successful people, they were both humble and grateful for what they had achieved, and for the blessings that life had bestowed upon them. As they discussed the reasons why they had managed to achieve so much in life, the wisest man among them spoke up and said that, in his estimate, “success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
Your time and your life are precious. The biggest waste of time and life is for you to spend years accomplishing something that you could have achieved in only a few months. By following the practical, proven process of goal setting and goal achieving laid out in this book, you will be able to accomplish vastly more in a shorter period of time than you have ever imagined before. The speed at which you move onward and upward will amaze both yourself and all the people around you. By following these simple and easy-to-apply methods and techniques, you can move quickly from rags to riches in the months and years ahead. You can transform your experience from poverty and frustration to affluence and satisfaction. You can go far beyond your friends and family and achieve more in life than most other people you know.
In my talks, seminars and consulting, I have worked with more than two million people all around the world. I have found, over and over, that an average person with clear goals will run circles around a genius who is not sure what he or she really wants.
My personal mission statement has not changed in years. It is: “To help people achieve their goals faster than they ever would in the absence of my help.”
This book contains the distilled essence of all that I have learned in the areas of success, achievement and goal attainment. By following the steps explained in the pages ahead, you will move to the front of the line in life. For my children, this book is meant to be a road map and a guide to help you get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. For my friends and readers of this book, my reason for writing it is to give you a proven system that you can use to move onto the fast track in your own life.
Welcome! A great new adventure is about to begin.
INTRODUCTION
This is a wonderful time to be alive. There have never been more opportunities for creative and determined people to achieve more of their goals than they can today. Regardless of short-term ups and downs in the economy and in your life, we are entering into an age of peace and prosperity superior to any previous era in human history.
In the year 1900, there were five thousand millionaires in America. By the year 2000, there were more than five million, most of them selfmade, in one generation. Experts predict that there will be another ten to twenty million millionaires created in the next two decades. Your goal should be to become one of them. This book will show you how.
A Slow Start
When I was 18, I left high school without graduating. My first job was as a dishwasher in the back of a small hotel. From there, I moved on to washing cars, and then washing floors with a janitorial service. For the next few years, I drifted and worked at various laboring jobs, earning my living by the sweat of my brow. I worked in sawmills and factories. I worked on farms and ranches. I worked in the tall timber with a chain saw and dug wells when the logging season ended.
I worked as a construction laborer on tall buildings, and as a seaman on a Norwegian Freighter in the North Atlantic. Often I slept in my car, or in cheap rooming houses. When I was 23, I was working as an itinerant farm laborer during the harvest, sleeping on the hay in the barn and eating with the farmer’s family. I was uneducated, unskilled, and at the end of the harvest, unemployed once more.
When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got a job in straight commission sales, cold calling from office-to-office and from door-todoor. I would often work all day long to make a single sale so that I could pay for my rooming house and have a place to sleep that night. This was not a great start at life.
The Day My Life Changed
Then one day, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down an outrageous goal for myself. It was to earn $1,000 per month in doorto-door and office-to-office selling. I folded up the piece of paper, put it away and never found it again.
But 30 days later, my entire life had changed. During that time, I discovered a technique for closing sales that tripled my income from the very first day. Meanwhile, the owner of my company sold out to an entrepreneur who had just moved into town. Exactly thirty days after I had written down my goal, he took me aside and offered me $1,000 per month to head up the sales force and teach the other people what it was that I was doing that enabled me to be selling so much more than anyone else. I accepted his offer and from that day forward, my life was never the same.
Within eighteen months, I had moved from that job to another, and then to another. I went from personal selling to becoming a sales manager with people selling for me. I recruited and built a 95 person sales force. I went literally from worrying about my next meal to walking around with a pocket full of $20 dollar bills.
I began teaching my salespeople how to write out their goals, and how to sell more effectively. In almost no time at all, they doubled and tripled and increased their incomes as much as ten times. Many of them are today millionaires and multi-millionaires.
It’s important to note that, since those days in my mid-20s, my life has not been a smooth series of upward steps. It has included many ups and downs, marked by occasional successes and temporary failures. I have traveled, lived and worked in more than 80 countries, learning French, German and Spanish along the way, and working in 22 different fields.
As the result of inexperience, and sometimes sheer stupidity, I have spent or lost everything I made and had to start over again - several times. In every case when this happened, I would begin by sitting down with a piece of paper and laying out a new set of goals for myself, using the methods that I’ll explain in the pages ahead.
After several years of hit and miss goal setting and goal achieving, I finally decided to collect everything I had learned into a single system. By assembling these ideas and strategies in one place, I
developed a goal setting methodology and process, with a beginning, middle and end, and began to follow it every day.
Within one year, following this blueprint for goal achieving, my life had changed once more. In January of that year, I was living in a rented apartment with rented furniture. I was $35,000 in debt and driving a used car that wasn’t paid for. By December, I was living in my own $100,000 condominium. I had a new Mercedes, had paid off all my debts and I had $50,000 in the bank.
Then I really got serious about success. I realized that this “goal setting” stuff was incredibly powerful. I invested hundreds and then thousands of hours reading and researching on goal setting and goal achieving, synthesizing the best ideas I could find into a complete goal setting and achieving process that worked with incredible effectiveness.
Anyone Can Do It
In 1981, I began teaching my system in workshops and seminars that have now reached more than two million people in 35 countries. I began audiotaping and video taping my courses so that others could use them. We have now trained hundreds of thousands of people in these principles, in multiple languages, all over the world.
What I found was that these ideas work everywhere, for everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience or background may be when you begin.
Most of all, these ideas have made it possible for me, and many thousands of others, to take complete control over our lives. The regular and systematic practice of goal setting has taken us from poverty to prosperity, from frustration to fulfillment, from underachievement to success and satisfaction. This system will do the same for you.
What I learned early on is that any plan is better than no plan at all. And it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. All the answers have already been found. There are hundreds of thousands, and even millions of men and women who have started with nothing and achieved great success following these principles. And what others have done, you can do as well, if you just learn how.
In the pages ahead, you will learn twenty-one of the most important ideas and strategies ever discovered for achieving everything that you could ever want in life. You will find that there are no limits to what you can accomplish except for the limits you place on your own imagination. And since there are no limits to what you can imagine, there are no limits to what you can achieve. This is one of the greatest discoveries of all. Let us begin.
“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. Confucius
CHAPTER 7
Analyze Your Beliefs
“The only thing that stands between a man and
what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and
the faith to believe that it is possible.”
________________________________________________
Richard M. DeVos
Perhaps the most important of all mental laws is the Law of Belief. This law says that, whatever you believe, with conviction, becomes your reality. You do not believe what you see; you see what you already believe. You actually view your world through a lens of beliefs, attitudes, prejudices and preconceived notions. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
In the Old Testament, it says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” This means that, you always act on the outside based on your innermost beliefs and convictions about yourself.
In the New Testament, Jesus says, “According to your faith, it is done unto you.” This is another way of saying that your intense beliefs become your realities. They determine what happens to you.
Dr. William James of Harvard said in 1905, “Belief creates the actual fact.” He went on to say, “The greatest revolution of my generation is the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
All improvement in your life comes from changing your beliefs about yourself and your possibilities. Personal growth comes from changing your beliefs about what you can do and about what is possible for you. Would you like to double your income? Of course you would! Here is the question; do you believe that it is possible? How would you like to triple your income? Do you believe that that is possible as well?
Whatever your level of skepticism, let me ask you a question. Since you started your first job, haven’t you already doubled or tripled your income? Aren’t you already earning vastly more than you earned when you started? Haven’t you already proven to yourself that it is possible to double and triple your income? And what you have done before, you can do again, and probably over and over, if you just learn how. You simply have to believe that it is possible.
Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Your Master Program For Success
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the 20th century in the field of human potential was the discovery of the self-concept. Everything you do or achieve in your life, every thought, feeling or action, is controlled and determined by your self-concept. Your self-concept precedes and predicts your levels of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. Your self-concept is the master program of your mental computer. It is the basic operating system. Everything that you accomplish in your outer world is a result of your self-concept.
What psychologists have discovered is that your self-concept is made up of the sum total of all of your beliefs, attitudes, feelings and opinions about yourself and your world. Because of this, you always operate in a manner consistent with your self-concept, whether positive or negative.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Here is an interesting discovery about the self-concept. Even if your self-concept is made up of erroneous beliefs about yourself or your world, as far as you are concerned, these are facts and you will think, feel and act accordingly.
As it happens, your beliefs about yourself are largely subjective. They are often not based on fact at all. They are the result of information you have taken in throughout your life, and the way you have processed that information. Your beliefs have been shaped and formed by your early childhood, your friends and associates, your reading and education, your experiences, both positive and negative, and a thousand other factors.
The worst of all beliefs are self-limiting beliefs. If you believe yourself to be limited in some way, whether or not it is true, it becomes true for you. If you believe it, you will act as if you were deficient in that particular area of talent or skill. Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and self-imposed limitations is often the biggest obstacle standing between you and the realization of your full potential.
Ignore The Experts
Albert Einstein was sent home from school as a young man with a learning disability. His parents were told that he was incapable of being educated. They refused to accept this diagnosis and eventually arranged for him to get an excellent education.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer had the same problems at school as a boy. His parents were encouraged to apprentice him to a shoemaker so that he would have a safe, secure job when he grew up. Both men went on to earn doctorates before the ages of twenty, and to leave their marks on the history of the twentieth century.
According to an article in Fortune Magazine on learning disabilities in business, many presidents and senior executives of Fortune 500 corporations today were diagnosed in school as being not particularly bright or capable. But by virtue of hard work, they went on to achieve great success in their industries.
Thomas Edison was expelled from school in the 6th Grade. His parents were told that it would be a waste of time to spend any money educating him, because he was not particularly smart or capable of being taught anything. Edison went on to become the greatest inventor of the modern age. This kind of story has been repeated thousands of times.
Self-limiting beliefs, sometimes based on a single experience or a casual remark, can hold you back for years. Almost everyone has had the experience of mastering a skill in an area where they thought they had no ability, and being quite surprised at themselves. Perhaps this has happened to you. You suddenly realize that your limiting ideas about yourself in that area were not based on fact at all.
You Are Better Than You Know
Louise Hay, the writer, says that the roots of most of our problems in life are contained in the feeling, “I’m not good enough.” Dr. Alfred Adler said that it is the natural inheritance of western man to have feelings of “inferiority” that start in childhood and often continue through adult life.
Many people, because of their negative beliefs, most of which are erroneous, falsely consider themselves to be limited in intelligence, talent, capability, creativity or skill of some kind. In virtually every case, these beliefs are false.
The fact is that you have more potential than you could ever use in your entire lifetime. No one is better than you and no one is smarter than you. People are just smarter or better in different areas at different times.
You Could Be A Genius
According to Dr. Howard Garner of Harvard University, the founder of the concept of multiple intelligences, you are possessed of at least ten different intelligences, in any one of which you might be a genius.
Unfortunately, only two intelligences are measured and reported throughout school and university: verbal and mathematical. But you could be a genius in the areas of visio-spatial intelligence (art, design,), entrepreneurial intelligence (business startups), physical or kinesthetic intelligence (sports), musical intelligence (playing musical instruments, writing music), interpersonal intelligence (getting along well with others), intra-personal intelligence (understanding yourself at a deep level), intuitive intelligence (ability to sense the right thing to do or say), artistic intelligence (creating works of art) or abstract intelligence(physics, science).
As the saying on the wall of the inner city school reads, “God don’t make no junk.” Each person is capable of achieving excellence in some way, in some area. You have within you, right now, the ability to function at genius or exceptional levels in at least one, and perhaps several different intelligences. Your job is to find out what it could be for you.
Your responsibility to yourself is to cast off all these self-limiting beliefs and accept that you are an extraordinarily capable and talented person. You are engineered for greatness and designed for success. You have competencies and capabilities that have never been tapped. You have the ability within yourself, right now, to accomplish almost any goal you can set for yourself if you are willing to work long enough and hard enough to achieve it.
Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn
The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all - about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Today, you “know” a lot of things. But, as the comic Josh Billings once wrote, “It ain’t what a man knows what hurts him. It’s what he knows what ain’t true.”
There are many things that you know about yourself that are simply not true. And these are almost always in the area of self-limiting beliefs. The starting point of unlocking more of your potential is for you to identify your self-limiting beliefs and then ask, “What if they were not true, at all?” What if you were possessed of an extraordinary ability in an area where you didn’t think you were very good at all, such as selling, entrepreneurship, public speaking or money making?
Think Of Yourself Differently
Everywhere I go, throughout the world, I have taught these principles to many tens of thousands of people. I have filing drawers full of letters and emails from people who had never heard this idea of self-limiting beliefs before. But once they heard it, they changed their entire attitudes towards themselves. They began to see themselves as far more competent and capable in key areas of their lives than they had ever been before.
In no time at all, they began transforming their lives and changing their results. Their incomes doubled and tripled and quadrupled. Many of them became millionaires and multi-millionaires. They went from the bottom of their companies to the top, from the worst performer in their sales forces to the highest earning person in their companies.
After they changed their beliefs about themselves and their personal potentials, they learned new skills and took on new challenges. They set bigger goals and threw their whole hearts into achieving them. By questioning their beliefs, and by refusing to accept that they were limited in any way, they took complete charge of their lives and careers, and created new realities for themselves. And what countless others have done, you can do as well.
Select The Beliefs You Want
Imagine that there was a “Belief Store,” very much like a computer software store that you could visit and purchase a belief to program into your subconscious mind. If you could choose any set of beliefs at all, which beliefs would be the most helpful to you?
Here is my suggestion. Select this belief: “I am destined to be a big success in life.”
If you absolutely believe that you are destined to be a big success, you will walk, talk, and act as if everything that happens to you in life is part of a great plan to make you successful. And as it happens, this is how the top people think in every field.
Look For The Good
Top people look for the good in every situation. They know that it is always there. No matter how many reversals and setbacks they experience, they expect to get something good out of everything that happens to them. They believe that every setback is part of a great plan that is moving them inexorably toward achieving the great success that is inevitable for them.
If your beliefs are positive enough, you will seek the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty. You will confidently believe that there are many things that you have to learn on the road to achieving and keeping your ultimate success. You therefore look upon every problem as a learning experience. Napoleon Hill wrote, “Within every difficulty or obstacle, there is the seed of an equal or greater advantage or benefit.”
With this kind of an attitude, you benefit from everything that happens to you, positive or negative, as you move upward and onward toward achieving your major definite purpose.
Act Your Way Into Feeling
There is a Law of Reversibility in psychology and metaphysics that says, “You are more likely to act yourself into feeling a particular way than you are to feel yourself into acting.”
What this means is that, when you start off, you may not feel like the great success that you desire to be. You will not have the selfconfidence that comes from a record of successful achievement. You will often doubt your own abilities, and fear failure. You will feel that you are not good enough, at least, not yet.
But if you “act as if” you were already the person you desire to be, with the qualities and talents that you desire to have, your actions will generate the feelings that go with them. You will actually act yourself into feeling the way you want to feel by the Law of Reversibility.
If you want to be one of the top people in your business, dress like the top people. Groom like the top people. Organize your work habits the way they do. Pick the most successful people in your field and use them as your role models. If possible, go to them and ask them for advice on how to get ahead more rapidly. And whatever advice they give you, follow it immediately. Take action.
When you start to walk, talk, dress and behave like the top people, you soon begin to feel like the top people. You will treat other people like the top people do. You will work the way the top people work.
You will start to get the results that the top people get. In no time at all, you will be one of the top people yourself. It may be trite to say “Fake it until you make it!” but there is a lot of truth to it.
The Secret Of A Sales Manager
A friend of mine is a very successful sales manager. After he had carefully interviewed and then selected a new salesman, he would take the salesman to a Cadillac dealership and insist that he trade in his old car for a new Cadillac. The salesman would usually balk at the idea. He would be frightened of the cost of the car and the huge monthly payments involved. But the sales manager would insist that he buy the Cadillac as a condition of employment.
What do you think happened afterwards? First, the salesman would drive the car home, and his wife would almost have a heart attack when she saw that he had bought a new Cadillac. But after she had settled down, he would take her for a ride around the neighborhood in the new Cadillac. The neighbors would see them driving in a new Cadillac as he waved on the way past. He would park his new Cadillac in front of his house or in his driveway. People would come over and admire it. Gradually, imperceptibly, at a subconscious level, his attitude toward himself and his earning potential would begin to change.
Within a few days, he began to see himself as the kind of person who drove a new Cadillac. He saw himself as a big money earner in his field. He saw himself as one of the top performers in his industry.
And time after time, almost without fail, average salespeople in this organization became sales superstars. Their sales performance jumped and they earned more than they had ever before. Soon, the payments on the new Cadillac were of no concern because their incomes were so much greater.
Create The Mental Equivalent
Emmet Fox, the spiritual teacher, once said that, “Your main job in life is to create the mental equivalent within yourself of what you want to realize and enjoy in your outer world.”
Your focus must be on creating the beliefs within yourself that are consistent with the great success you want to be in your outer world. You achieve this by challenging your self-limiting beliefs, rejecting them and then acting as if they did not exist.
You reinforce the development of new, life-enhancing beliefs by increasing your knowledge and skills in your field to the point where you feel equal to any demand or challenge. You accelerate the development of new, positive beliefs by setting bigger and more exciting goals in every area. Finally, you act continually as if you were already the person that you desire to be.
Your aim is to reprogram your subconscious mind for success by creating the mental equivalent in everything you do or say.
Behave Consistent With Your New Self Image
You develop new beliefs by taking actions consistent with those beliefs. You act as if you already believed that you have these capabilities and competences. You behave like a positive, optimistic and cheerful person toward everyone. You act as if your success were already guaranteed. You act as if you have a secret guarantee of success, and only you know about it.
You realize that you are developing, shaping and controlling the evolution of your own character and personality by everything that you do and say, every single day.
Since you become what you think about, you should only say and do those things that are consistent with your self-ideal, the person you most aspire to be, and your long-term future ideals. You should only think and talk about the things that are moving you toward becoming the person you want to be and toward achieving the goals that you want to achieve.
Make A Decision
Make a decision this very day to challenge and reject any self-limiting beliefs that you might have that could be holding you back. Look into yourself and question the areas of your life where you have doubts about your abilities or talents. You might ask your friends and family members if they see any negative beliefs that you might have.
Often, they will be aware of negative self-limiting beliefs you have that you are not aware of yourself. In every case, once you have identified these negative beliefs, ask yourself, “What if the opposite were true?”
What if you had the ability to be extraordinarily successful in an area where you currently doubt yourself? What if you had been programmed from infancy with genius ability in a particular area? For example, what if you had within you, right now, the ability to earn and keep all the money you could ever want, throughout your life? What if you had a “golden touch” with regard to money?
If you absolutely believed these things to be true, what would you do differently from what you are doing today?
Keep Your Words and Actions Consistent
Your beliefs are always manifested in your words and actions. Make sure that everything you say and do from now on is consistent with the beliefs that you want to have, and the person that you want to become. In time, you will replace more and more of your self-limiting beliefs with life-enhancing beliefs. Over time, you will completely reprogram yourself for success. When this occurs, the transformation that takes place in your outer life will amaze you, and all the people around you.
Analyze Your Beliefs:
“Act as if!” If you were one of the most competent and highly respected people in your field, how would you think, act and feel differently from today?
Imagine that you have a “golden touch” with regard to money. If you were an extremely competent money manager, how would you handle your finances?
Identify the self-limiting beliefs that could be holding you back. How would you act if they were completely untrue?
Select a belief that you would most like to have about yourself at a deep inner level. Pretend as if you already believe this to be true about you.
Look into the most difficult situation you are dealing with right now. What valuable lessons does it contain that can help you to be better in the future?
CHAPTER 8
Start at the Beginning
“Your problem is to bridge the gap between where
you are now and the goals you intend to reach.”
________________________________________
Earl Nightingale
Imagine that you were going to take a long trip across the country. The first thing you would do would be to choose your destination and then get a road map to determine the very best way to get there. Each day, before you started out, you would locate yourself on a map relative to where you are and where you plan to go in the hours ahead. Life is very much the same.
Once you have decided upon your values, vision, mission, purpose and goals, the next step is for you to analyze your starting point. Exactly where are you today, and how are you doing, in each of the important areas of your life, especially as they relate to your goals?
Practice The Reality Principle
Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric for many years, once said that the most important quality of leadership is the “reality principle.” He defined this as the ability to see the world as it really is, not as you wish it were. He would begin every meeting to discuss a goal or a problem with the question, “What’s the reality?”
Peter Drucker refers to this quality as “intellectual honesty,” dealing with the facts exactly as they are before attempting to solve a problem or make a decision. Abraham Maslow once wrote that the first quality of the self-actualizing person was the ability to be completely honest and objective with himself, or herself. It is the same with you.
If you want to be the best you can be, and to achieve what is truly possible for you, you must be brutally honest with yourself and your point of departure. You must sit down and analyze yourself in detail to decide exactly where you are today in each area.
Start At The Beginning
For example, if you decided to lose weight, the very first thing you would do is to weigh yourself to determine how much you weight today. From then on, you continually use that weight as your measure for whether or not you are making progress in weight reduction.
If you decide to begin a personal exercise program, the first thing you do is to determine how much you are exercising today. How many minutes per day and per week are you exercising, and how intensely each time? What kind of exercises are you doing? Whatever your answer, it is important that you be as accurate as you possibly can. You then use this answer as a starting point and make your exercise plans for the future based on it.
Determine Your Hourly Rate
If you want to earn more money, the first thing you do is sit down and determine exactly how much you are earning right now. How much did you earn last year, and the year before? How much will you earn this year? How much are you earning each month? The best measure of all is for you to determine how much you are earning each hour, right now.
You can determine your hourly rate by dividing your annual income by 2000, the approximate number of hours that you work each year. Even better, you can divide your monthly income by 172, the number of hours you work, on average, each month.
Many of my coaching clients calculate their hourly rate each week, and compare it against previous weeks. They then set a goal to increase the value of what they do each hour so as to increase the amount they earn each hour on a go-forward basis. You should do the same.
Tight Time or Financial Measures Improve Performance
The tighter and more accurate your calculations regarding your income, or any other area, the better and faster you can improve in each one of them. For example, the average person thinks in terms of monthly and annual salary. This is hard to analyze and increase. Conversely, the high performer thinks in terms of hourly rate, which is amenable to improvements on a minute-to-minute basis.
Since you are the president of your own personal services corporation, you should view yourself as being on your own payroll. Imagine you are paying yourself by the hour. Be just as demanding on yourself as you would be on someone else who was working for you. Refuse to do anything that doesn’t pay your desired hourly rate.
Your Current Net Worth
If you have set a long-term financial goal, the next step is for you to determine exactly how much you are worth today, in financial terms. If your goal is to become a millionaire in the years ahead, you must calculate exactly how much you have accumulated as of today’s date.
Most people are confused or dishonest about this calculation. Your true dollar net worth is the amount that you would have left over if you sold everything you own today at what the market would pay, and then paid off all your bills, prior to leaving the country.
Many people place a high value on their personal possessions. They think that their clothes, cars, furniture and electronics are worth a lot of money. But the true value of these items is usually not more than 10% or 20% of what you paid, and sometimes less.
Develop Long Term Financial Plans
For accurate financial planning, calculate your net worth today and then draw a line from that point to your long-term financial goal. Divide the line by the number of years you intend to spend to achieve that financial goal. In this way, you will know exactly how much you have to save, invest and accumulate each year in order to become financially independent.
Is your goal realistic, based on where you are today and the time that you have allocated to get to where you want to go? If your goal is not realistic, force yourself to be completely honest and revise both your calculations and your projections.
Practice Zero Based Thinking
When you begin to plan your long-term future, one of the most valuable exercises you can engage in is called “zero based thinking.” In zero based thinking, you ask this question, “Knowing what I now know, is there anything that I am doing today that I wouldn’t start up again today, if I had to do it over, knowing what I now know?”
No matter who you are or what you are doing, there are certain things in your life that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again today if you had them to do over.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for you to make progress in your life if you allow yourself to be held back by decisions you have made in the past. If there is something in your life that you wouldn’t get into again today, your next question is, “How do I get out, and how fast?”
Apply zero based thinking to the people in your life, both business and personal. Is there any relationship in your life, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into? Is there any person that you have hired, assigned or promoted that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t hire back again today? Is there any person that you are working with or for that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get involved with again today? Be perfectly honest with yourself when you ask and answer these questions.
Evaluate Each Area of Your Life
Examine every aspect of your work life and career. Is there any job that you have taken on that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into? Is there any part of your business or work, that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t start up again? Is there any activity, process, product, service or expenditure in your business that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t embark upon again today, if you had to do it over?
After people and work considerations, look at your investments. Is there any investment of time, money or emotion that, knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into again today, if you had to do it over? If the answer is “no”, how do you get out, and how fast?
Be Prepared to Make Necessary Changes
I have a good friend who was a golfer in high school and university. As a bachelor, he played golf several times a week. He organized his entire life around golf, even flying south in the winter to golf courses that had no snow on them.
Over time, he started and built a business, got married and had children. But he was still “locked in” to the idea of playing golf several times a week. Eventually, the enormous time commitment of playing golf began to affect his business, his married life and his relationship with his children.
When the stress became too great, he sat down and zero based his activities. He realized that, knowing what he now knew, in his current situation, the golf would have to be cut back dramatically if he was going to achieve other things in his life that were now more important. By reducing his golfing time, he got his whole life back into balance in just a few weeks. How might this principle apply to you? What major time consuming activities should you reduce or eliminate?
Circumstances Are Continually Changing
Fully 70% of the decisions that you make will turn out to be wrong in the fullness of time. When you made the decision or commitment, it was probably a good idea, based on the circumstances of the moment. But now, the situation may have changed and it is time to “zero base” it based on the way things are today.
You can usually tell if you are in a zero based thinking situation because of the stress that it causes. Whenever you are involved in something that knowing what you now know, you wouldn’t get into, you experience ongoing stress, aggravation, irritation and anger.
Sometimes people spend an enormous amount of time trying to make a business or personal relationship succeed. But if you zero base this relationship, the correct solution is often to get out of the relationship altogether. The only real question is whether or not you have the courage to admit that you were wrong and take the necessary steps to correct the situation.
What Is Holding You Back?
If you want to earn a certain amount of money, ask yourself, “why am I not I earning this amount of money already?” What is holding you back? What is the major reason that you are not already earning what you want to earn? Again, you must be perfectly honest with yourself.
Look around you and identify people who are earning the kind of money that you want to earn. What are they doing differently from you? What special skills and abilities have they developed that you have not yet developed? What skills and abilities do you need to acquire if you want to earn the same kind of money they are earning? If you are not sure, go and ask them. Find out. This is too important for guesswork or chance.
Determine Your Level of Skills And Ability
Do a skills inventory on yourself. First, identify the key result areas of your work. These are the tasks that you absolutely, positively have to fulfill in an excellent fashion in order to do your job well. What are they?
In every job there are seldom more than 5-7 key result areas. These are critical tasks. You must be excellent at each one of them in order to do the whole job for which you are paid. You must be good at every one of these tasks if you want to earn the kind of money that you are capable of earning.
Here is an important discovery: Your weakest key skill sets the height at which you can use all your other skills. Your weakest key result area, whatever it is, determines your income in your field. You can be absolutely excellent at everything except for one key skill, and that skill will hold you back, every step of the way.
In what area, at which skill are you the very best at what you do? What particular skill, or combination of skills, is responsible for your success in your career to date? What is it that you do as well or better than anyone else?
Identify Your Weakest Areas
Once you have answered these questions, you then look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “What are my weakest skill areas?” Where are you below average or poor? What is it that you do poorly that interferes with your ability to use your other skills? What is it that you do poorly, that other people do better than you? Especially, what key skills do you lack that are essential for your success? Whatever they are, you need to identify them accurately and honestly and then make a plan to improve in each area. (We will discuss this in depth in a later chapter.)
Imagine Starting Over
When you embark on the achievement of any great goal, you should imagine that, at any time, you could start your career over again. Never allow yourself to feel locked in or trapped by a particular decision from the past. Keep focused on the future.
Many people today are walking away from their educations, their businesses, their industries and their years of experience and getting into something completely new and different. They are honest enough to recognize that there is a limited future in the direction they are going, and they are determined to get into something where the future possibilities are far greater. You must do the same.
In doing a baseline assessment of yourself and your life, you must face the facts, whatever they are. As Harold Geneen of ITT once said, “Facts don’t lie.” Seek out the real facts, not the obvious facts, the apparent facts, the hoped for facts or the wished for facts. The true facts are what you need to make good decisions.
Be Prepared to Reinvent Yourself
Take a hard look at your current company and industry. Take a hard look at your current job situation. Take a hard look at your market relative to your competitors. In reinventing yourself, stand back and think about starting your career over again today, knowing what you now know.
Imagine that your job and your industry disappeared overnight. Imagine that you had to make brand new career choices. If you were starting over again today, with your special combination of talents and skills, what would you choose to do that is different from what you are doing now?
Your Most Valuable Asset
Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability. It is your ability to apply your talents and skills in the marketplace to earn money. In reality, you could lose your home, your car, your bank account, and your furniture, and be left with nothing but the clothes on your back. But as long as your earning ability was intact, you could walk across the street and begin generating a good living almost immediately.
Your earning ability is extremely precious to you. And your earning ability can be either an appreciating asset or a depreciating asset. Your earning ability can grow in value if you continue to invest in it and develop it. It can decline in value if you begin to take it for granted and start to coast on the basis of what you have done in the past.
Bundle of Resources
See yourself as a “bundle of resources,” capable of doing many different things. You have a wide variety of skills, abilities, knowledge, talents, education and experience. There are many jobs and tasks that you could do, or learn to do, extremely well. Never allow yourself to get locked in to a particular course of action, especially if you are not happy with the way things are going today.
In mentally starting over, as though you were beginning your career anew, look deeply into yourself as well. What good habits do you have that are helping you and moving you toward your goals? What bad habits have you developed that may be holding you back? What are your very best qualities of character and personality? What are your weakest qualities? What new habits and qualities do you need to develop to get the very most out of yourself, and what is your plan to begin developing them? What bad habits do you need to get rid of, and replace with good habits?
Go From Good to Great
Jim Collins in his best selling business book, Good to Great, says that you must be willing to ask the “brutal questions” of yourself and your business if you are going to identify and remove the obstacles that are preventing you from moving ahead. What are some of the brutal questions that you have to ask yourself before you launch wholeheartedly toward your goals?
Whenever I do strategic planning for a company, we start off the session with four questions. First, where are we now? We gather data and information from every part of the company to develop a crystal clear picture of our starting point, especially with regard to sales, market position and profitability.
Second, we ask, “where would we ideally like to be in the future?” We idealize and practice future orientation. We imagine that we can make the company into anything we like in the years ahead, and we create a perfect vision of what the company would look like if we were successful in every respect.
Third, we ask, “How did we get to where we are today? What did we do right? What would we do differently? What have been our biggest successes so far, and why did they occur? What have we failed at, and what were the reasons for it? As George Santayana wrote, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
The fourth question we ask and answer is always, “What do we do now, to get from where we are to where we want to go?” Based on our experience, what should we be doing more of, or less of? What should we start doing that we are not doing today? What should we stop doing altogether?
Put Together Your Own Strategic Plan
The good news is that if we have answered the first three questions accurately, the strategic plan or blueprint comes together more easily than if we were trying to plan without being clear about where we were or how we got there.
There is an old saying, “Well begun is half done.” Doctors say, “Accurate diagnosis is half the cure.” Taking the time to honestly evaluate each part of your situation before you launch toward your goal will save you months and even years on your journey. In many cases, it will force you to reevaluate your goals in the light of superior analysis and knowledge. It will dramatically improve the speed at which you achieve your goals once you get going.
Start At The Beginning:
Determine the reality of your current situation relative to your major goals. Where are you now, and how far do you have to go?
Apply the zero based thinking principle to every area of your life. What are you doing today that you wouldn’t get into again if you had it to do over, knowing what you now know?
Do a complete financial analysis of your life. How much are you earning today, and how much are you worth? What are your goals in these areas?
Do a complete skills analysis on yourself and your work. Where are you good? Where do you need to improve?
Determine exactly how much you earn each hour, and what it is you do to earn that amount. What do you have to do to increase your hourly rate in the months ahead? 6. Imagine your future was perfect in every way. What would have to happen to make that vision a reality?
CHAPTER 9
Measure Your Progress
“There is no road too long to the man
who advances deliberately and without undue haste;
there are no honors too distant to the man
who prepares himself for them with patience.”
________________________________________
Jean de la Bruyere
You have incredible mental powers that you habitually fail to use to their full extent. By systematically setting goals for your life and making detailed plans to achieve them, you will save yourself years of hard work in reaching the same level of success. Goal setting enables you to use vastly more of your thinking powers than the average person.
Your conscious mind is the “head office” of your life. Its role is to deal with the information in your environment and then to identify, analyze, compare it against other information and then to decide what actions to take.
But it is your subconscious mind that contains the great powers that can enable you to accomplish vastly more than you ever have before. At least 90% or more of your mental powers are “below the surface.” It is essential that you learn to tap into these powers to motivate, stimulate and drive you forward toward the achievement of your goals.
Program Yourself With Goals
Your subconscious mind functions best with clear goals, specific tasks, deliberate measures and firm deadlines. The more of these with which you program your subconscious computer, the better it functions for you and the more you will accomplish in a shorter period of time.
As you set your goals and begin moving toward them, it is essential that you establish a series of benchmarks or measures that you can use to evaluate your progress, day-by-day and hour-by-hour. The more clear and specific the measures you set, the more accurate you will be in hitting your targets on schedule.
Your subconscious mind requires a “forcing system,” composed of deadlines that you have imposed on yourself for task accomplishment and goal attainment. Without a forcing system, it becomes easy for you to procrastinate and delay, and to put off important tasks until much later, if at all.
Three Keys To Peak Performance
There are three keys to peak performance in achieving your goals. They are commitment, completion and closure.
When you make a firm commitment to achieve a particular goal, and you put aside all excuses, it is very much like stepping on the accelerator of your subconscious mind. You will be more creative, determined and focused than ever before. Great men and women are those who make clear, unequivocal commitments and then refuse to budge from them, no matter what happens.
Completion is the second ingredient in peak performance. There is an enormous difference between doing 95% of a task and doing 100% of a task. In fact, it is very common for people to work very hard up to the 90% or 95% level and then to slack off and delay the final completion of the task. This is a temptation that you must fight against. You must continually force yourself, discipline yourself, to resist this natural tendency and push through to completion.
Nature’s Wonder Drug
Every time you complete a task of any kind, your brain releases a small quantity of endorphins. This natural morphine gives you a sense of well-being and elation. It makes you feel happy and peaceful. It stimulates your creativity and improves your personality. It is nature’s “wonder drug.”
The more important the task that you complete, the greater is the quantity of endorphin that your brain releases, very much like a reward for success and achievement. Over time, you can develop a positive addition to the feelings of well being that you receive from this “endorphin rush.”
Even when you complete a small task, you feel happier. When you complete a large task, you feel happier still. When you finish the various steps on the way to the completion of a large task, at every achievement, you get an endorphin rush. You feel continuously happy and exhilarated when you are working steadily toward the completion of an important job.
Create the Winning Feeling
Everyone wants to feel like a “winner.” And feeling like a winner requires that you win. You get the feeling of the winner by completing a task 100%. When you do this repeatedly, eventually you develop the habit of completing the tasks that you begin. When this habit of task completion locks in, your life will begin to improve in ways that you cannot today imagine.
In psychology the reverse is always true. The “incomplete action” is a major source of stress and anxiety. In fact, much of the unhappiness that people experience is because they have not been able to discipline themselves to follow through and complete an important task or responsibility.
The Pain of Procrastination
If you have ever had a major assignment that you have been putting off, you know what I am referring to. The longer you wait to get started on an assignment and the closer the deadline approaches, the greater stress you experience. It can start to keep you up at night, and affect your personality. But when you finally launch into the task and push it through to completion, you feel a great sense of relief and well being.
It is almost as if nature rewards you for everything that you do that is positive and life enhancing. At the same time, nature penalizes you with stress and dissatisfaction when you fail to do the things that move you toward the goals and results that are important to you.
The Balanced Scorecard
One of the most popular movements in modern management is toward the “balanced scorecard.” Using these scorecards, every person, at every level of the business, is encouraged to identify the key measures that indicate success, and then to give themselves scores every day and every week in each of those key areas.
Here is an important point. The very act of identifying a number or score, and then paying close attention to it will cause you to improve your performance in that area. For example, if someone were to tell you, before a meeting, that you were going to be evaluated on how well you listened in that meeting, your listening skills would improve dramatically within a few moments. You would listen far more carefully and attentively throughout the meeting because you knew that this behavior was being observed.
In the same way, whenever you select a goal, measure or activity that is important to you, and begin observing, or paying attention to it in your day-to-day life, your performance in that area improves.
One of the most helpful actions you take in your own career is to set benchmarks, and create scorecards, measures, metrics and deadlines for every key task that you must complete on the way to one of your goals. In this way, you activate your subconscious forcing system. This forcing system will then motivate you and drive you, at an unconscious level, to start earlier, work harder, stay later and get the job done.
Close The Loop
The third “C”, after commitment and completion, is “closure.” This is the difference between an “open loop” and a “closed loop.” Bringing closure to an issue in your personal or business life is absolutely essential for you to feel happy and in control of your situation.
Lack of closure, unfinished business, an incomplete action of any kind, are all major sources of stress, dissatisfaction and even failure in business. They consume enormous amounts of physical and emotional energy.
The Key Ability
Perhaps the most important ability in the world of work is “dependability.” There is nothing that will get you paid more and promoted faster than to develop a reputation for getting your tasks done quickly and well, and on schedule. Whatever your goals, make a list of all the tasks that you will have to accomplish in the achievement of those goals. Put a deadline on every one of those tasks. Then, work every day and every hour to hit your deadlines. Measure your progress each day as you go along. Speed up or slow down where necessary. But remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. The greater clarity that you have with regard to deadlines and measures, the more you will accomplish and the faster you will get it done.
A goal or a decision without a deadline is merely a discussion. It has no energy behind it. It is like a bullet with no powder in the cartridge. Unless you establish deadlines to which you are committed, you will end up “firing blanks” in life and work.
Sometimes people ask, “What if I set a deadline and I don’t achieve the goal by the deadline?”
Simple. Set another deadline, and then another, if necessary. Deadlines are “best guess” estimates of when the task will be completed. The more you set and work toward deadlines, the more accurate you will become in predicting the time necessary to complete them. You will become better and better at achieving your goals and completing your tasks on schedule, every time.
Eating An Elephant
You have heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” And the answer is, “One bite at a time.”
This metaphor applies to achieving any big goal, as well. How do you achieve a huge goal? You accomplish it one step, one task, one measure at a time.
Break your long-term goals down into annual, monthly, weekly and even hourly goals. Even if your long-term goal is financial independence, look for a way to break that down into how you are going to use each hour of the coming day in such a way that longterm financial independence is far more likely.
If you want to increase your income, you know that all income is a result of “added value.” Look at everything you do and then ask yourself how you could add more value so that you can be worth more than you are earning today.
Identify Your Most Valuable Task
Go and ask your boss, “What one thing do I do that is more valuable than anything else?” Whatever his or her answer, look for ways to perform more and more of that task, and to get better and better at doing it.
It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your tasks down into bite sized pieces, set deadlines and then do one thing at a time, every single day. You have heard the old saying, “By the yard it’s hard; but inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.”
Continuous and Never Ending Improvement
If you want to increase your hourly rate and your income, look for ways to get a little bit better at the most important things you do, every single day. Read one hour per day in your field. Listen to audio programs on your way to and from work. Take additional courses whenever you can. These activities will propel your entire career onto the fast track. When you invest an extra one or two hours per day in self-improvement, the cumulative effect on your greater ability to get results can be extraordinary.
Get Healthy and Fit
If you want to lose weight, there is a simple five-word formula: “Eat Less and Exercise More.”
If you discipline yourself to eat a little bit less, but eat higher quality foods, and simultaneously exercise a little bit more each day, you can get into the rhythm of losing one ounce per day. No matter how much you weigh today, if you lose one ounce each day that will equal about two pounds per month. Two pounds per month will be 24 pounds per year. In no time at all, you can retrain your body and your appetite so that you lose the weight and keep it off for the rest of your life.
Save Your Pennies and the Dollars Will Save Themselves
If you want to become wealthy, begin to question every single expense. Set a goal to save $3, $5, or $10 per day. Put this money away in a savings account and never touch it. As it grows, invest it carefully in well-chosen mutual funds or index funds. Make daily, weekly and monthly saving and investment into a habit and keep it up for the rest of your working life.
In no time at all, you will become comfortable living on slightly less than you are spending today. As your income increases, increase the amount that you save. In a few weeks, a few months, a few years, you will be out of debt and have a large amount of money put away and working for you. A few years down the road, you will be financially independent.
Become A Learned Person
If you read 15 minutes each evening, rather than watching television, you will complete about 15 books per year. If you read in the great classics of English literature for 15 minutes each day, in seven years you will have read the 100 greatest books ever written. You will be one of the best-educated and most erudite people of your generation. And you can achieve this just by reading 15 minutes each evening before you go to bed.
Increase Your Income
If you are in sales and you want to increase your income, keep careful track of how many calls, how many presentations, how many proposals and how many sales you are making each day, each week and each month at the present time. Then, set a goal to increase your number of calls, presentations and proposals per day. Set a goal to increase your number of sales each week and each month. Every day, measure yourself against your own standards.
If You Measure It, You Can Manage It
In each area of your life, analyze your activities carefully and select a specific number that, more than anything else, determines your level of success in that area. Then focus all of your attention, all day long, on that specific number. The very act of focused attention will cause you to perform better in that area, both consciously and unconsciously.
If you want to be healthier, you could focus on the number of minutes per week that you exercise, or the number of calories per day that you eat. If you want to be successful financially, you can focus on the amount you earn each hour, or the amount that you save each month. If you want to be successful in sales, you could focus on the number of calls you make each day, or the number of sales, or the size of sales, you make each month. If you want to be successful in your relationships, you can focus on the number of minutes that you spend face to face with the most important people in your life, each day and each week.
You have heard the saying, “What gets measured gets done.” There is another saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Your ability to set specific measures on your goals and then to keep an accurate record and track your performance each day will assure that you achieve your goals exactly when you have decided to, or even before.
Measure Your Progress:
Determine a single measure that you can use to grade your progress and success in each area of life. Refer to it daily.
Determine the most important part of your job as it affects your income, and measure your daily activities in that area.
Set a minimum, specific amount for daily, weekly, monthly saving and investment, and discipline yourself to put away those amounts.
Break every large goal down into measurable, controllable parts, and then focus on accomplishing each part on a fixed deadline.
Make it a game with yourself to set benchmarks, measures, scorecards, targets and deadlines for every goal, and then focus on those numbers and dates. The goals will take care of themselves.
Resolve to accomplish at least one specific part of a larger goal each day, and never miss a day.
Conclusion
Take Action Today
You have now learned perhaps the most comprehensive strategy for setting and achieving goals that has ever been put together in one book. By practicing these rules and principles, you can accomplish more in the coming months and years than most people accomplish in a lifetime.
The most important quality you can develop for lifelong success is the habit of taking action on your plans, goals, ideas and insights. The more often you try, the sooner you will triumph. There is a direct relationship between the number of things you attempt and your accomplishments in life. Here are the 21 steps for setting and achieving goals, and for living a wonderful life.
Unlock Your Potential – Always remember that your true potential is unlimited. Whatever you have accomplished in life up to now has only been a preparation for the amazing things you can accomplish in the future.
Take Charge of Your Life – You are completely responsible for everything you are today, for everything you think, say and do, and for everything you become from this moment forward. Refuse to make excuses or to blame others. Instead, make progress toward your goals every day.
Create Your Own Future – Imagine that you have no limitations on what you can do, be or have in the months and years ahead. Think about and plan your future as if you had all the resources you needed to create any life that you desire.
Clarify Your Values – Your innermost values and convictions define you as a person. Take the time to think through what you really believe in and care about in each area of your life. Refuse to deviate from what you feel is right for you.
Determine Your True Goals – Decide for yourself what you really want to accomplish in every area of your life. Clarity is essential for happiness and high performance living.
Decide Upon Your Major Definite Purpose – You need a central purpose to build your life around. There must be a single goal that will help you to achieve your other goals more than any other. Decide what it is for you and work on it all the time.
Analyze Your Beliefs – Your beliefs about your own abilities, and about the world around you, will have more of an impact on your feelings and actions than any other factor. Make sure that your beliefs are positive and consistent with achieving everything that is possible for you.
Start At The Beginning – Do a careful analysis of your starting point before you set off toward the achievement of your goal. Determine your exact situation today and be both honest and realistic about what you want to accomplish in the future.
Measure Your Progress – Set clear benchmarks, measures, metrics and scorecards for yourself on the road to your goals. These measures help you to assess how well you are doing and enable you to make necessary adjustments and corrections as you go along.
Remove The Roadblocks – Success boils down to the ability to solve problems and remove obstacles on the path to your goal. Fortunately, problem solving is a skill you can master with practice, and thereby achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible.
Become An Expert In Your Field – You have within you, right now, the ability to be one of the very best at what you do, to join the top 10% in your field. Set this as a goal, work on it every day, and never stop working at it until you get there.
Associate With The Right People – Your choices of people with whom to live, work and socialize will have more of an effect on your success than any other factor. Resolve today to associate only with people you like, respect and admire. Fly with the eagles if you want to be an eagle yourself.
Make a Plan Of Action – An ordinary person with a well thought-out plan will run circles around a genius without one. Your ability to plan and organize in advance will enable you to accomplish even the biggest and most complex goals.
Manage Your Time Well – Learn how to double and triple your productivity, performance and output by practicing practical and proven time management principles. Always set priorities before you begin, and then concentrate on the most valuable use of your time.
Review Your Goals Daily – Take time every day, every week, every month to review and reevaluate your goals and objectives. Make sure that you are still on track and that you are still working toward things that are important to you. Be prepared to modify your goals and plans with new information.
Visualize Your Goals Continually – Direct the movies of your mind. Your imagination is your preview of your life’s coming attractions. Repeatedly “see” your goals as if they already existed. Your clear, exciting mental images activate all your mental powers and attract your goals into your life.
Activate Your Superconscious Mind – You have within you and around you an incredible power that will bring you everything and anything you want or need. Take the time regularly to tap into this amazing source of ideas and insights for goal attainment.
Remain Flexible At All Times – Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it. Be constantly open to new, better, faster, cheaper ways to achieve the same result, and if something is not working, be willing to try a different approach.
Unlock Your Inborn Creativity – You have more creative ability to solve problems and come up with new and better ways for goal attainment than you have ever used. You are a potential genius. You can tap into your intelligence to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
Do Something Every Day – Use the “Momentum Principle of Success” by getting started toward your goal and then doing something every day that moves you closer to what you want to accomplish. Action orientation is essential to your success.
Persist Until You Succeed – In the final analysis, your ability to persist longer than anyone else is the one quality that will guarantee great success in life. Persistence is self-discipline in action, and is the true measure of your belief in yourself. Resolve in advance that you will never, never give up!
There they are, the twenty-one most important principles of goal setting and goal achieving ever discovered. Your regular review and practice of these principles will enable you to live an extraordinary life. Nothing can stop you now.
Good luck!
